Life is the result of a balance between two opposing forces; the absence of either is injurious to the creature. Vandenesse, in piling up satisfaction, had quenched desire, that lord of the universe, at whose disposal lie vast stores of moral energy. Extreme heat, extreme suffering, unalloyed happiness, like all abstract principles, reign over a barren desert. They demand solitude, and will suffer no existence but their own. Vandenesse was not a woman, and it is women only who know the art of giving variety to a state of bliss. Hence their coquetry, their coldness, their tremors, their tempers, and that ingenious battery of unreason, by which they demolish today what yesterday they found entirely satisfactory. Constancy in a man may pall, in a woman never. Vandenesse was too thoroughly good-hearted wantonly to plague the woman he loved; the heaven into which he plunged her could not be too ardent or too cloudless. The problem of perpetual felicity is one the solution of which is reserved for another and higher world. Here below, even the most inspired of poets do not fail to bore their readers when they attempt to sing of Paradise. The rock on which Dante split was to be the ruin also of Vandenesse; all honor to a desperate courage!
His wife began at last to find so well-regulated an Eden a little monotonous. The perfect happiness of Eve in her terrestrial paradise produced in her the nausea which comes from living too much on sweets. A longing seized her, as it seized Rivarol on reading Morian, to come across some wolf in the sheepfold. This, it appears, has been the meaning in all ages of that symbolical serpent to whom the first woman made advances, some day no doubt when she was feeling bored. The moral of this may not commend itself to certain Protestants who take Genesis more seriously than the Jews themselves, but the situation of Madame de Vandenesse requires no biblical images to explain it. She was conscious of a force within, which found no exercise. She was happy, but her happiness caused her no pangs; it was placid and uneventful; she was not haunted by the dread of losing it. It arrived every morning with the same smile and sunshine, the same soft words. Not a zephyr’s breath wrinkled this calm expanse; she longed for a ripple on the glassy surface.
There was something childish in all this, which may partly excuse her; but society is no more lenient in its judgments than was the Jehovah of Genesis. The Countess was quite enough woman of the world now to know how improper these feelings were, and nothing would have induced her to confide them to her “darling husband.” This was the most impassioned epithet her innocence could devise, for it is given to no one to forge in cold blood that delicious language of hyperbole which love dictates to its victims at the stake. Vandenesse, pleased with this pretty reserve, applied his arts to keep his wife within the temperate zone of wedded fervor. Moreover, this model husband wanted to be loved for himself, and judged unworthy of an honorable man those tricks of the trade which might have imposed upon his wife or awakened her feeling. He would owe nothing to the expedients of wealth. The Comtesse Marie would smile to see a shabby turnout in the Bois, and turn her eyes complacently to her own elegant equipage and the horses which, harnessed in the English fashion, moved with very free action and kept their distance perfectly. Félix would not stoop to gather the fruit of all his labors; his lavish expenditure, and the good taste which guided it, were accepted as a matter of course by his wife, ignorant that to them she owed her perfect immunity from vexations or wounding comparisons. It was the same throughout. Kindness is not without its rocks ahead. People are apt to put it down to an easy temper, and seldom recognize it as the secret striving of a generous nature; whilst, on the other hand, the ill-natured get credit for all the evil they refrain from.
About this period Mme. de Vandenesse was sufficiently drilled in the practices of society to abandon the insignificant part of timid supernumerary, all eyes and ears, which even Grisi is said, once on a time, to have played in the choruses of the La Scala theatre. The young Countess felt herself equal to the part of prima donna, and made some essays in it. To the great satisfaction of Félix, she began to take her share in conversation. Sharp repartees and shrewd reflections, which were the fruit of talks with her husband, brought her into notice, and this success emboldened her. Vandenesse, whose wife had always been allowed to be pretty, was charmed when she showed herself clever also. On her return from the ball or concert or rout where she had shone, Marie, as she laid aside her finery, would turn to Félix and say with a little air of prim delight, “Please, have I done well tonight?”
At this stage the Countess began to rouse jealousy in the breasts of certain women, amongst whom was the Marquise de Listomère, her husband’s sister, who hitherto had patronized Marie, looking on her as a good foil for her own charms. Poor innocent victim! A Countess with the sacred name of Marie, beautiful, witty, and good, a musician and not a flirt—no wonder society whetted its teeth. Félix de Vandenesse numbered amongst his acquaintance several women who—although their connection with him was broken off, whether by their own doing or his—were by no means indifferent to his marriage. When these ladies saw in Marie de Vandenesse a sheepish
